Buy it... if even a haphazard and unfocused extension of ideas from
the first Sherlock Holmes score will meet your expectations, or
if you went on a road trip to Slovakia and found the region's
traditional gypsy music intoxicating.

Avoid it... if you were dissatisfied with Hans Zimmer and his
team's seemingly lazy approach to coordinating the equally disjointed
and incohesive soundtrack for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger
Tides earlier in 2011.

Editorial Review:

Written
12/16/11 - Filmtracks Rank: #882

Zimmer

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows: (Hans
Zimmer/Lorne Balfe) Following the surprising success of the 2009
adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famed Sherlock Holmes into
the cinematic action genre, Warner Brothers expressed an immediate
interest in a sequel. Most the same cast and crew was assembled in short
order to enact Doyle's "The Final Problem," the story set in 1891 in
which detective Sherlock Holmes' chief nemesis, Professor Moriarty, is
first introduced. In Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Moriarty
leads Holmes and his sidekick, Dr. Watson, on an adventure through
Europe that begins with the investigation of the assassination of the
Crown Prince of Austria. Teaming with a fortune telling gypsy along the
way, the group of protagonists remains one step behind the brilliant
schemes of Moriarty, whose motives are far broader than anyone first
surmises. The cool, blue hues and gritty humor of Sherlock Holmes
return for the 2011 sequel, the latter courtesy of the chemistry between
lead actors Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law. Also resurrected is the
sound of composer Hans Zimmer, aided this time by Lorne Balfe just as in
the prior entry. The previous score was nominated for an Academy Award
and Grammy in part because of the composer's notoriety but also owing to
the quirky, gypsy-like personality of its accordion, banjo, cimbalom,
and fiddle-performed primary theme. Zimmer had successfully managed to
take the sound of his obscure score for An Everlasting Piece and
expand it into the realm of his action music, creating a hybrid of gypsy
enthusiasm and brute force from The Peacemaker that was difficult
to ignore. For the sequel, the composer took roughly the same path, but
he did so by pushing both sides of the franchise's music to their
extremes. It is another case in which the production of the soundtrack
turned into an excuse for unrestrained fun on the part of the composer,
this time yielding a road trip to Slovakia and Vienna to find and record
genuine gypsy music. One could easily get the impression with Zimmer and
his team's product for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger
Tides earlier in 2011 that a fluid, entertaining creation process
for the music was the primary concern, and the evidence points to such
an environment in the planning of A Game of Shadows as well.
Similar to many of Zimmer's ensemble crew soundtracks, this one has a
distinctly vague overall personality and practically no narrative
direction. It relies upon eccentric expressions of the two halves to the
previous score without setting any particularly solid foundation for
this film.

It's difficult to fault anyone for having fun at his or
her workplace. So many people have such mundane jobs that it is
refreshing to hear the echoes of Zimmer's laughter in scores like A
Game of Shadows. There is a sense of liberation that comes with such
a free spirit doing what tickles his fancy. At the same time, however,
the composer and his army of assistants had a job to do for A Game of
Shadows, and just as with On Stranger Tides, you get the
impression that the larger goal was sacrificed in the process of seeking
fun avenues of expressing gypsy demeanor and tinkering with the standard
Zimmer action formula that was set to a combination of procedures from
The Peacemaker once again and Inception on top of that.
There is practically no instrumental cohesion to A Game of
Shadows whatsoever, despite the prominent placement of the gypsy
elements. Those fiddle, accordion, guitar, and clarinet performances
(among others) are indeed impressively exotic in their authentic
performance emphasis. The recordings of the Slovakian performers are
quite admirable in many respects. The traditional orchestral elements
are far less inspired, again relying upon the lowest registers of an
ensemble to throb, brood, and thump their way through one moment of
power after another. The third factor in the makeup of the score is the
synthetic one, with overlays of odd noises sometimes obvious in their
meaning but at other times a tool of disillusionment. These three basic
parts never interact with much cohesion in A Game of Shadows, the
gypsy and orchestral recordings seemingly acting exclusively in the mix
most of the time and the synthetic overlays obnoxious in nearly every
application. Stylistically, Zimmer is so enthralled with the gypsy sound
that he relies heavily upon it, using these performances as an extension
of the significant source-like usage coordinated for the film. The
orchestral half of the score is tired and redundant, the action cues
(assembled in three "Shadows" suites near the start of the soundtrack's
album) following all the expected trademarks of Zimmer's steady
techniques in this area. You'll hear the "foghorn blasts" (as Zimmer's
fans affectionately call them) from Inception, the repetition of
notes to pound home their emphasis, and massive minor-key phrases deep
in the bass that are reminiscent of The Peacemaker. This final
point is a bit ironic given that this comment was made about the first
Sherlock Holmes score and now the franchise has extensive parts
aboard a train to bring that sound full circle. Zimmer's suspense
material, concentrated in the final third of the album, is generic to
his career in less interesting ways. The trio of album tracks from "Did
You Kill My Wife?" to "The Mycroft Suite" is an example of vignette
philosophy at work.

Thematically, A Game of Shadows completely lacks
major development of new motifs and does little to expand upon the
two-part theme from the original film. Aside from cute manipulations of
the primary phrase of the main theme in a few cues, "The End?"
redundantly expresses only a slightly altered, fuller performance of the
idea. The theme's second part does figure more prominently in the
album's second half, "Memories of Sherlock" creepy in conveying this
idea on piano over a troubled soundscape. No clearly expressed new
themes are explored to an effective end in A Game of Shadows, a
series of pounded pairs in "Chess" and "Zu Viele Fuchse Fur Euch Hansel"
joining a vague, ascending phrase in the action material to serve as the
score's only secondary motifs of significant repetition. As usual,
Zimmer plays with other composers' compositions for this assignment,
absolutely mutilating Mozart's opera "Don Giovanni" in the process of
turning it into a cheap Media Ventures exposition of poor taste and
layering Schubert's "Die Forelle" with unlistenable distortion and
overlays of droning crap. Zimmer's personal obsession with Ennio
Morricone causes the theme from the 1970 score Two Mules for Sister
Sara to be licensed as well, though at least this outside
performance is left unaltered and is refreshingly dynamic in tone
compared to the stomping inelegance of the full ensemble parts of the
rest of the soundtrack. These diversions, along with the forcing of more
gypsy material into the score, cause the whole of A Game of
Shadows to be severely disjointed, a trait of too many Zimmer scores
of this era. Even if you can separate the highlights, it's a two-star
score at best. But what ultimately sinks this effort to the bottom of
the barrel is its atrocious mixing. Rarely do soundtracks sound as awful
as this one, in part because of the manipulation of the music in jarring
edits and, as mentioned before, in part due to the unnecessary synthetic
overlays that kill several cues (the "tick tock" of the action cues even
induces eye rolling). The album's arrangement is not only awkward, but
it contains studio dialogue, troublesome merging of adjacent recordings,
and the usual overbearing bass. The remix at the end of the CD, "Romani
Holiday," is completely unnecessary and symbolic of all the score's
failings. Three bonus cues downloadable through the CD's enhanced
portion offer two gypsy pieces as source material and a waltz cue that
spins off into standard Zimmer pounding and more generic suspense. At
the end of the day, it's clear that the composer and his associates had
a jolly good time producing this soundtrack. But as an effective film
score, it totally lacks any cohesive development and intersperses
unnecessarily grating effects into its formula. After the success of the
prior entry in the franchise, it's painful to hear that score's
ingredients thrown haphazardly at the wall to see what still sticks. *Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Hans Zimmer reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 2.98 (in 89 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.01
(in 264,824 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.

The insert includes extensive credits and a single page advertisement
for $2 ringtones from each of the CD tracks. The CD is enhanced and will open a
link on your computer to additional music and videos available online.